This weighty book of 500 pages has just reached us, and the editors deserve our gratitude and appreciation. Their labor has been a service to the field: Jim Evans, Mary Blair Dellinger, and the late Harold Russell. No neurofeedback denier could read this book and remain resolute in his convictions. As it has evolved over the decades, the field is too diverse and multi-fold to have emerged out of mere imaginings into a grand delusion. This is not to deny, however, that grand delusions have also been a motive force. And the disagreements among us have always played a much greater role than whatever beliefs we shared.

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Overview

Some academics still consider the placebo model of neurofeedback to be a hurdle to overcome. At this point I question whether to even take up this issue, because as far as we are concerned these people are beating a dead horse. It honors the question too greatly even to discuss it once again. The appearance of the paper last year titled “The Fallacy of Sham-Controlled Neurofeedback Trials 2018,” by Cannon, Pigott, and Trullinger shifts the balance of the argument because it rests on assumptions about neurofeedback that are themselves questionable. Taking up this topic then serves as a springboard to call the entire operant conditioning model of neurofeedback into question, and to propose the more inclusive model of associative learning. We navigate this labyrinth step by step.

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The Backstory

Nestled in a valley of the Himalayan Mountains in Northern India is a small Tibetan Colony called Bir, just 31 miles south of Dharamsala, Himachal Pradesh, India, the city of His Holiness the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan government in-exile. Bir is home to many Tibetans and several Buddhist Monasteries, but is also world-renowned for Paragliding. In November, 2018, Bir hosted the World Cup Qualifiers and was also a landing point for me and Virginia Rojas Albrieux, as we embarked upon a journey to support change in the Tibetan Children’s Village of Chauntra, neighboring Bir to the South.

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My name is Peter B. I have worked the past eight years as an Emergency Department staff nurse. About eighteen years ago, I was attacked by unknown assailants and struck in the head repeatedly with a telescoping steel baton. Showing what I now know to be signs of traumatic brain injury (TBI) and skull fracture (Battle’s sign, raccoon eyes, and a massively swollen occipital region of my skull), I lay in bed for a week recovering, and eventually returned to my life. This event was followed by a series of concussions over a period of a year and a half. Even prior to the attack, I had already been suffering from anxiety and PTSD.

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My teenage son started Neurofeedback with Melissa Sklar in October of 2017 because of issues he was having with anxiety, depression, Asperger’s, and suicidal thoughts. He was having significant issues with functioning at school, and several doctors and psychologists were recommending that we try Neurofeedback to help deal with his various issues. My son has had various other interventions over his entire life that have each in their own way helped somewhat, including occupational therapy, high-dose supplementation, gluten-free diet, B-12 shots, psychotherapy, etc. But when he contracted Lyme disease about six years ago, everything changed. Almost immediately he started having suicidal thoughts, and talking about suicide has continued on and off over those 6 years (as we have not been able to kill the Lyme bacteria).

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